Dear Andrew and others,
we too here in Leiden have such an initiative and are allready deploying our
system for some of our user groups. We created a general web based grid
service that allows you to hook in any application on a cluster. Our
infrastructure is "application based" and if your users only use a few apps,
you might find it rather usefull.
The users now interact to a grid of clusters through, perhaps a basic
interface on the web, or through a more advanced java app or i.e. on the
command line like I prefer to do so ;-).
The infrastructure uses x509 certificates for security and is implemented
using Apache, MySQL and PHP on the web server side with a c++ coded daemon
running in userspace (not as root but as a cluster user!) using the STL with
libCURL on the cluster (grid resource) itself. It shouldn't be to hard for a
regular sysadmin to install and maintain that for the few relevant
applications your users tend to use...
If you are interested, we are about to test run programs like VASP, Gaussian
and ADF on our own clusters through this infrastructure somewere this month.
Currently we have the infrastructure already running on two of our own
clusters, two national supercomputers in the Netherlands (without even having
to have had root privileges or asking any administrator anything ;-p), on a
few laptops and my own test machine. It runs a 'hello world' hooking into
Torque / PBS, Load Leveler or just forks the executable.
More information can be found at http://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/LGI/docs where
you can find a presentation I gave last month in Leiden and Amsterdam and the
original design / work document I wrote to keep me from forgetting all the
details ;-). At http://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/LGI/daemon you can browse
through the deamon source code and if you want I can send you a personal test
certificate with a key (PKCS12) so you can use your browser to browse through
the basic web interface at https://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/LGI/basic_interface
Oh on http://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/LGI/docs/screen_shots you can see
screenshots of the basic interface and the command line interface in
action... On http://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/LGI/daemon/LGI.cfg you can see how
easy it is to configure the daemon on a resource and on
http://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/LGI/daemon/LGI.log you can see the log it
produces...
Best wishes,
Mark Somers.
--
Dr. M. F. Somers
Theoretical Chemistry - Leiden Institute of Chemistry - Leiden University
Einsteinweg 55, P.B. 9502, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
tel: +31715274437
mail: m.somers at chem.leidenuniv.nl
web: http://rulgla.leidenuniv.nl/Researchers/Somers.htm
room: HB322